The Life of Dad

by Anna Machin

  It is probably true to say that adding a baby to your relationship will mean that you have more arguments and disagreements and feel more resentful towards your partner than ever before – lack of sleep and a steep learning curve will do that to you. But it is about how you resolve these arguments and move forward that counts. And be reassured, it is overwhelmingly the case that the dads in my studies say that having a child has only deepened and strengthened the relationship they have with their partner. I’ll let Noah and Adrian close this chapter with their thoughts:

  Adrian: We are very much in synch on parenting styles, we very much agree on what we want for [our daughter] and how to raise her. We are on a level about things because, despite being very different people, we have similar standards and outlooks.

  Noah: We have been together twenty years. We have had her for seven, so we had thirteen years before her and we had real highs and, you know, really amazing times, and that is why, when I look at her, I think, I am really glad we stayed together. I think it has made our relationship so much better. Because you have somebody else who takes all your attention . . .

  Adrian: . . . and brings you a huge amount of joy.

  Adrian and Noah, dads to Judy (seven)

  PART FIVE

  And Now the Fun Begins . . .

  CHAPTER NINE

  The School of Dad

  What Dads Teach Kids

  I grew up playing football, my parents coming to watch me play football and cricket . . . I can’t wait to experience those things with my son. I’m looking forward to teaching him things and influencing his life by being around. I want to be around him as much as I can, support him in every way I can.

  Zac, dad to Aidan (six months)

  Fathers love to teach. I learnt many skills and life lessons from my father that are still vital to me today. Among many other things, he taught me that you should treat others how you want to be treated, that a willingness to work hard and try your very best is more critical for success than mere intelligence and that today’s seemingly overwhelming problem will seem inconsequential in a day, a month or a year. Add to this the ability to lay bricks and the warning never to trust a man in brown suede shoes, and I was set for life. When I ask the fathers in my studies what they look forward to in their future relationship with their children, it is overwhelmingly the case that their vision includes the passing on of knowledge, the teaching of values, the coaching of a sport or the playing of a favourite game. Some are counting the days until their treasured toys from childhood – usually Lego, trains or Meccano – can be liberated from the loft and put to good use in a father–child celebration of play.

  In this chapter, I want to look at the unique role fathers play in teaching their children. Alongside their drive to protect their children, it is universally the case that fathers play a key role in teaching and guiding their children towards adulthood and independence. But education is not just what we learn in school. Humans exist in a complex world where there are many behaviours to learn, skills to master and beliefs to interrogate and adopt. A child’s future success rests not only on their intellectual and academic capabilities but on their ability to negotiate their social and physical environment, building healthy relationships with those close to them, productive alliances with those with whom they work and ensuring they cooperate to acquire the basic essentials for survival. And we know from previous chapters that fathers appear to have a unique role to play in this socialization.

  Humans gain practical and intellectual knowledge by a process of social learning – put simply, they learn from other people. The world is a terribly complicated and confusing place and to learn everything we need to know to ensure survival – technological, economic, practical and social – would be impossible if we each approached gaining this knowledge by a system of trial and error. Instead, we use the fact that others have gone before us to tap into their experience, learn from them and then build on their knowledge to go forward and innovate. This may sound rather obvious and not such a big deal, but perhaps if you knew that we are the only species that actively teaches its young, you might grasp what a feat of neural and behavioural development this ability actually is. It is true to say that some animals learn by watching their parents – baby chimps can spend five years at their mother’s elbow watching how she cracks a palm nut – but the parent provides no tailored guidance or feedback; the child is left to find their own way through the learning maze. There is no allowance made by the chimp parent for the different abilities that Chimp A might have from his sister, Chimp B, and identifying and nurturing his individual interests and strengths is not a priority. In contrast to your chimpanzee mother, human parents are capable of assessing their child’s abilities and interests, recognizing their individual motivators, understanding the need to tailor their communication to individual learning styles and provide appropriate levels of carrot and stick to make sure skills are embedded. This all requires immense cognitive ability and, as with so much of our behaviour, our unique ability to teach is due to our large brains. Remember the couple in Chapter Eight, watching their child on the TV screen? For both of them, this task involved engaging the area of the neocortex linked to mentalizing – the ability to understand what someone else is feeling or thinking. It is this area of the brain, and this ability to ‘mind-read’, that also allows us to teach. Only by understanding what someone else doesn’t know, what they want to know and whether they understand what we have taught them can we effectively teach them.

  In many societies, the skills of a successful life are not taught in the formal setting of a classroom but out in the real world, often alongside your parents. So, Ota the Aka father ensures his children – boys and girls – learn the skills of net hunting by taking them with him deep into the Congo jungle on the daily search for food. Sigis, our Kipsigis father, ensures his sons understand the complexities of the tea trade by asking them to accompany him into the fields and to the male-only social gatherings where alliances are forged, knowledge is exchanged and deals are made. Even our apparently hands-off Bostonian lawyer, Mike, ensures that education is a priority. Beyond his financial investment in their private education, he spends his weekends introducing his children into the social world of the Bostonian business elite, ensuring they develop the networking skills that will see them in good stead in their future professional careers.

  But here in the West there is an overwhelming focus on formal academic learning and achievement, often to the detriment of the attainment of other key life skills. And there is an ongoing debate about the extent to which a father has an independent influence on his child’s academic achievements. The evidence for a parental influence is overwhelming – parents who are actively involved in their child’s education at home and in school contribute positively to a child’s academic success. This means providing the space and structure at home to study, taking time to read with your child, supporting their completion of homework and taking them on educational outings. But whether dad has an independent and separate role from mum has been an issue of some controversy for years. Because mums generally spend the majority of time with children, the assumption has been that this ‘parenting effect’ is, in fact, a ‘mothering effect’. The evidence for an independent role for fathers is less strong. But absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence, and with a growing focus on this aspect of dad’s role comes the recognition that fathers have the potential to play an equal but critically different role in their child’s academic success. And most, like Colin, are highly motivated to get involved:

  Reading books, I love books, and we’ve already got her a Beatrix Potter collection upstairs and Roald Dahl. I was read to a lot as a kid at bedtime and stuff, and I want to do that as well, I’d love to do that. That is what I am looking forward to, seeing her become something special and being there to support her in what she does.

  Colin, dad to Freya (six months)

  My colleagues Eirini Flouri and Ann Buchanan are le
ading the quest for the all-important evidence to support the fact of a father’s unique role in influencing their child’s academic attainment. Working from the Department of Social Policy and Social Work at Oxford University, they believe that fathers who are involved with their children, and in particular already push their developmental and cognitive boundaries through play, must have a separate and equally significant influence on their children’s school careers as the mother. In their 2004 study, they used data taken from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) to try to find firm evidence for their hunch. This invaluable UK-based dataset has followed 17,000 children who were born between 3 and 9 March 1958 for over forty years. Its long-term nature has meant that researchers like Flouri and Buchanan can understand what factors – socio-economic, environmental, physiological, educational and parental – have an impact on the trajectory of a child’s development. Using the data regarding educational attainment, they found that, as with previous studies, the extent to which both parents were involved with their children at age seven had a significant impact on their child’s academic achievements at the age of twenty. Involvement was defined by the frequency with which they read to or with the child, took him or her on outings, took an interest in his or her education and managed his or her behaviour. But if this parenting team were split into mum and dad, dad was found to have a separate and highly significant impact on the extent of his child’s academic success by late adolescence. Further, this impact did not depend on the level of mum’s involvement – low or high, his influence could still be felt. And despite some suggesting that fathers may have more to teach sons than daughters, his influence was the same regardless of the gender of his children.

  All important and significant stuff. But what Flouri and Buchanan’s study didn’t manage to clear up was what this particular aspect of the dad’s involvement with his child’s education was. What was he doing that was different but so effective? It was left to Californian educationalist William Jeynes to explore this question. Looking at data from thousands of people across the globe, Jeynes focused his analysis on four key potential areas of influence: fostering academic achievement, fostering psychological well-being, encouraging positive behavioural outcomes and fostering other healthy outcomes, such as being motivated to play with their kids.

  What Jeynes found was wonderful and, for those of us who study dads, made total sense, because it reflected what we now know a key dad role to be: supporting his child’s entry into the wider world by encouraging the development of appropriate behaviours. First, Jeynes confirmed Flouri and Buchanan’s finding that dad had a significant influence on his kids’ educational attainment that was separate to mum’s. So that is now a given. But it was what dad contributed that was particularly great. Yes, he had some influence on his child’s actual academic attainment, but his real power sat with the influence he had on his child’s attitude to learning. Jeynes found that fathers had a profound impact on their children’s behaviour and their psychological outcomes. Dads who were involved with their children – who fostered good behaviour, strong psychological health and a healthy attitude to life and school – taught their kids to have a good learning attitude, allowing them to reap all the benefits they could from their schooling. Jeynes argued that while the job to foster academic success was shared between mum and dad, only dad was the one who had a focus on moulding and modelling the correct learning mindsets and behaviours. He provided the foundations, the scaffolding on which a child could build their academic journey.

  The role of a father in his child’s academic life appears to reach its most critical point with early adolescence. At this time of whirling hormones, changing bodies and new challenges, it is often the case that a child’s perception of their abilities and strengths takes a knock. But a recent study of 11,297 young American adolescents has shown that with the right sort of father involvement, a child’s ability to achieve can survive this time of personal turmoil intact. It is all down to the father’s power to influence his child’s self-esteem, and this power lies in the relationship he builds with his developing child. American developmental scientist Mellissa Gordon, who headed the study, found that where fathers worked to build quality relationships with their adolescent child – one that was supportive, warm and lacking in criticism – not only did dad’s school involvement increase but their child’s sense of self was more robust and, as a consequence, they were able to achieve their full potential. It was about working to maintain that secure bond that is the foundation of all the interactions between father and child.

  In contrast, Lucia Ciciolla led a team of American scientists to explore the influence that a parent’s emphasis on the overwhelming importance of academic excellence had on their academic attainment. Using data from 506 early adolescents from across three American schools, she explored to what extent an emphasis on academic achievement, rather than social ability, and a high level of criticism relating to academic performance influenced a child’s ability to achieve at school. What she found is a salutary lesson for all parents who, in an increasingly competitive world, may believe that academic achievement at any cost is the most important survival lesson to teach your child. Ciciolla found that where a parent placed little emphasis on educational attainment at all costs and taught that kindness and sociability were equally, if not more, important, children reported less perceived criticism, had higher self-esteem and, in fact, achieved better grades and were perceived to be academically stronger than those children who believed that their parents placed a disproportionate emphasis on achieving high grades. Now these results stood whether the parent was mum or dad. But the key issue for fathers is that where children reported that their parents did place undue pressure on them to achieve, fathers generally exhibited this behaviour at a higher rate than mothers.

  So, the message for dads is this: if you want your child to achieve all they can at school, you do need to try to ensure your relationship with them is the warmest and most supportive it can be. So, take the time you have to nurture their self-esteem, involve yourself in their daily school life, teach them the value of having the right learning mindset and emphasize that academic achievement alone is of little use if you do not have the equivalent social skills – kindness, emotional intelligence and the ability to cooperate – to sit alongside those exceptional grades. Although his son Christopher is only six months old, Will seems to be on the right track:

  I think there is something about being a role model. We have talked about what type of person he might be and all the rest of it, and we want him to be his own person, but there are certain things in terms of how he treats other people, how he respects himself and, for me, that is about being the best person that I can be. So, I’m thinking about a lot of the things I do or that I let slide. I’m changing the way I do a lot of things and trying to step up my game, because I know you can do a lot of the big one-off gestures – the big ‘oh, let’s take you out and have a really fun day’ – but the thing that is going to make the difference in terms of how he lives his life and who he becomes is actually how I am living my life, day to day.

  We all know education is about more than learning, about more than mastering your ABC or the intricacies of long division. And teaching is about more than going to school. We have already encountered in previous chapters the idea that one of the key roles for a father is to fit their children for the big wide world. To encourage them towards independence and self-reliance so they can make a success of their life. Jeynes’s finding that fathers ‘scaffold’ their children’s school experience is yet another example of this phenomenon. Dads deliver the strong foundations that enable you to get the most out of your life and build a successful future. But fathers also have much to impart outside the classroom, and for many this means an important role in teaching moral and religious values and life skills. And many dads find that to achieve this they must become, like Will, their child’s role model.

  I want to introduce you to a fragment of poetr
y:

  The mother looked up in the father’s face,

  And a thoughtful look was there,

  Jack’s words had gone like a lightening flash

  To the hearts of the loving pair –

  ‘If Jack treads in my steps, then day by day

  How carefully I must choose my way!

  For the child will do as the father does,

  And the track I leave behind,

  If it be firm, and clear, and straight,

  The feet of my son will find.

  He will walk in his father’s steps and say,

  “I am right, for this was my father’s way.”

  Of fathers leading in life’s hard road,

  Be sure of the steps you take,

  That the sons you have when grey-haired men

  Will tread in them still for your sake.